


Things

by Raven (singlecrow)



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Daemons, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-07
Updated: 2014-07-07
Packaged: 2018-02-07 15:32:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1904292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/pseuds/Raven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>"Needs must in a time of war, sir."</em>
</p><p>Starfleet and its daemons.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things

Kira knows everything’s going to hell when they handcuff Odo on the Promenade, push him down to his knees in front of the Prophets and everyone, Starfleet and Klingon troops and all of the customers at Quark’s, and Odo puts his head back and submits to it, says nothing, becomes nothing, although he could shapeshift and slip through those bonds as easily as Kira can think about it. She strides off to Ops with her daemon on her shoulders, clinging tight enough for her claws to draw blood, and Sisko comes out of his office just as she's about to barge into it, glances at her and says, "Major, we're going to fix this."

Dax is yelling at someone over the comm, a stranger comes up on the turbolift, and suddenly they've swept the battle plans out of Ops, upset all of the day's shift rhythms, and a man, a slimy blond human with three crisp pips on his crisp Starfleet collar is holding forth to the station senior staff. 

"On the basis that this is a time of war," the man begins, and Kira wants to get out of her chair and strangle him with the casualty lists. She wants to make him eat the meat and blood of this battlefield. "Certain actions are… necessary. Certain forms of scientific research, perhaps biological research."

"That is vague, Commander Satie," Sisko says, after a moment. That's right, Kira thinks: Commander Satie, recently reactivated from reserve duty as a Starfleet instrument of the Department of Internal Affairs. Her daemon growls next to her heart, anger hissing and clawing its way out of her skin. "Why don't you get to the point?"

"Very well, Captain. Computer, display image."

The image that flashes onto the screen is of Kira's own quarters. She's in the centre of the field of view, looking over her shoulder and laughing with a cup of ginger tea in her hands. Odo is leaning against the wall and talking with his hands. It's such a domestic image that it seems to make them all pause for a moment. Then Kira is getting to her feet, fury still inside her like a wild creature, and Chief O'Brien is saying something to Bashir and Jadzia is saying, "Nerys" – and Sisko raises a hand for silence, and gets it. Beneath the table, a low growling begins. 

"What," Sisko says, when he can be heard, "is the meaning of this?"

"The Founders have no daemons," Satie says, at last. His daemon, a small bat, flaps her wings with a sound like wet tarpaulin. "Odo - was thought to be different. You see."

Another flash, and a fast sequence of images - Odo on the Promenade, a few months or years ago; Odo caught in the background of a news image produced by one of the Bajoran media outlets; Odo turned away from the camera, against the grey background of the Terok Nor ore processing plant. In each image, he's accompanied by a Tarkelean hawk, perched firmly on his shoulder.

"That's - not real," Kira says, blankly. "Odo is a changeling. He can shift form to whatever he likes."

She feels like she's stating the obvious. Satie's lip curls before he says, delicately, "Ah. A deception?"

Kira's going to kill him, but somehow Sisko has stepped in the way; he's saying, smoothly, "I don't think, Commander, you've ever had the experience of living on a space station with one thousand inhabitants of whom none are even in the remotest part similar to yourself. I doubt you have any understanding, of what you might do, in such a circumstance, to fit in."

"Nevertheless," Satie says, "the fact remains that Odo is one of the Founders, he is intimately acquainted with the internal workings of the Dominion, and more than that, the substance of his body has the Founders' vulnerabilities. He has lived here on this station at the front lines of the war with little to no supervision of his activities, and now we discover that he has been deceiving..."

"Biological research," Sisko says, disbelieving, and Satie merely looks at him.

"Needs must in a time of war, Captain."

"Excuse me, sir." It's Chief O'Brien, and the sound of his voice calms Kira a little. She supposes that even after all this time, Miles and Keiko feel like home. "May I say something?"

"By all means, Chief," Sisko says, courteously, glancing at Satie as though daring him to object. 

"It's just this," O'Brien says, his fingers carding through his daemon's fur, "it's that - that image, that's from the worker surveillance the Cardassians installed on the station. It'd have been a hell of a job to rip everything out when we came, so I hardwired the privacy settings so only Constable Odo can access those feeds. For security, you know. So, if someone took that image, and Odo didn't know about it…"

He breaks off, and he and Bashir exchange glances. "Section 31," Julian murmurs, almost, but not quite, too quietly to be heard. 

Satie pushes back his chair in a sharp, single motion and says, "Dr Bashir, I don't know what you think you mean by that, but" – but Kira's not listening, after that, though people are still yelling. Suspiria places a great weighty paw on Kira's foot: it's Sisko's kindness, and a warning against doing something she'd regret. Kira heeds it.

"Enough," Sisko snaps, over the noise. "Enough. Commander, if you want to accuse Odo of something, then I suggest you get along and _do_ it. We'll have a fair trial. It'll all be clean and" - he looks at Bashir, and then at O'Brien - "above board. Otherwise I'll arrange to have Odo released from custody directly and you can raise a complaint with your superiors if you see fit."

"Very well, Captain," Satie says, and sweeps out, his daemon flapping after him so the dignity of the exit is rather spoiled. No one laughs. 

"Benjamin," Jadzia is saying, "this isn't good. Even if Satie listens to you, Odo is – he won't make this easy for himself. And he's right about times of war, that's the worst thing. I've been here a long time and I've seen how this works. There are special orders, orders that say, by any means necessary…"

"Inter arma enim silent leges," Bashir says, sounding haunted. 

"Precisely," Sisko says, and Kira's startled when he smiles and stretches out his hands. "But there's some good news, old man. I called the cavalry."

Jadzia looks confused for a moment, then her face clears. "Ah. Is it possible that the cavalry owed you a favour?"

"Clip, clop, clip, clop," Sisko says, still smiling, and Kira would be furious with both of them for not taking this seriously, were it not for the fact that under the surface mirth Suspiria is still growling, long and low and resonant, and twenty-four hours later, during which Kira rails and Odo sits in his own cells and Quark forgets to take his customers' money, the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-E requests permission to dock on upper pylon three.

*

"Benjamin, my dear," comes the soft, soft voice in the dark, and perhaps there's been some part of him, all these years, that's been waiting for this.

"Leila," Ben says, and sits back on his perch on the ladder. It's dark and deserted on this small runabout drifting into Risian space control. Ben Sisko has places to be, a new commission to take up, but nothing is more important than this, not yet. "Are you… really here?"

"As much so as anything is," Leila tells him, glittering in the darkness, and for the thousandth time, maybe, he appreciates her beauty. Leila is an odd, lush creature – in the Trill language, _thithali_ – all sparkles and mosaic feathers, with the broad wingspan required for Trill's weight of atmosphere. She's like nothing found on Earth, although Jake, aged two, called her 'flutterby' and Ben supposes it's as good a description as any. "Let us say, if I am a figment of someone's imagination, it's not yours."

Ben nods, slowly, and her colours shine in the dark. "Are you," he begins, and he's not sure how to say it.

"I am Curzon Dax's daemon," she tells him, and that's the certainty of the spheres in those words: as though saying it holds it true, a little longer. "I am, Benjamin. I am, I am, I am."

"But more Dax," Ben offers, after a pause, "than Curzon. Right now."

"Yes." 

It sounds like an admission of guilt, and Ben breathes in and out in the dark. "You still…"

"Look like this?" She flaps her wings and sparkles, and Benjamin thinks about Curzon's joie de vivre, his hedonism, his passion for understanding everything that grows, moves, and lives. "It's been seventy years, Benjamin. Curzon is my heart and my hearth and my home."

"But," Ben says, gently, when she falls silent.

"But he's not" – she falters; it's another admission of guilt – "all I've been."

"Nor," Ben says, still gently, "all you'll be."

"No," she says, and those great wings come together for a moment, so the colours disappear into the dark. Ben thinks that if he touched her now, moth-silk would come off on his fingers, and then fade off his hands. "No, no, no."

Six times before and so much fear, Ben thinks: six times around, and it's still the great mystery, the deep and the dark. Feeling inadequate to the task, he holds out a hand, and she flutters in his direction gratefully; perhaps it's just the being here, after all. "Dax," he says, helplessly, and she moves closer but they don't touch, skimming past each other in the dark.

"Something's coming," she says, wonderingly. Her head comes up, as though looking up at a sudden breeze. Through her, Ben can see the far wall's shadows.

"Curzon," he says, with the weight of the end in his voice, because here it is, here in the dark. "I'm – I'm going to miss you."

"Look after her," Leila says, dips her wings and laughs, and it's Curzon's laugh, echoing in the darkness. Benjamin's own head comes down, then, into his hands, so he doesn't see her disappear, and hears her voice on the shifting currents of air for just a few seconds longer, _goodbye, my friend, goodbye_.

*

“You’re not the only joined Trill in the universe or even on the station,” Sisko is telling Jadzia, “you don’t have to testify, old- Jadzia.”

“You can call me ‘old man’ if you want to,” Jadzia says. “Like you called Curzon Dax, that cranky old man with an overgrown swamp thithali for a daemon. Because I hold all his memories; because I am who he was.”

Jadzia's daemon drops sinuously off the roof and curls around her shoulders. It's a gesture of determination, Kira thinks. 

Sisko nods. “All right, old man. Whatever you think best, I'm behind you."

Jadzia nods, brings her heels together sharply, and returns to her post in Ops. Kira is wondering how she can concentrate on her work, or the station's tactical position, or the necessity of breathing, or anything. In the replimat in the afternoon, she drinks a raktajino and doesn't taste it, and looks at a padd and doesn't make out the words on it, and when she looks up at the sound, _clip-clop_ , _clip-clop_ , like coconut shells, her head is heavy and her eyes blurry with grit.

"May I join you?" Jean-Luc Picard asks, and when she nods, sits down and sips from a mug of tea and, for a minute, doesn't say anything, and Kira is grateful. Picard does owe Sisko a favour, and Kira has been thinking back to the last time the Enterprise was at Deep Space Nine, and the irritation she barely suppressed at the sight of that gleaming flagship and its gleaming cohort of officers. Even Sisko, Starfleet through and through, said it himself, once: _it's easy to be perfect in paradise_. But the Enterprise has returned from Betazed, fought back bravely and tirelessly and in vain, stood to bear witness to its fall to the Dominion, and they're here, now, to fight yet another battle. Kira respects that.

"Major Kira," Picard says, "I'm sure you're aware that the trial begins in the morning."

Kira manages a smile, by some small miracle. "I'm… aware, yes."

"Are you intending to testify?"

"I would like to," Kira says, frowning in surprise, "but Odo and me – it's a conflict of interest, surely?"

"These aren't," Picard says, thoughtfully, "exactly ordinary judicial circumstances. Commander Satie's not from the sector JAG office. This is an instance of the Department of Internal Affairs acting somewhat ultra vires, I fear."

"You're saying," Kira says, her mind working overtime, "that they can't do this. That it's – a sham trial, that they can't…"

Picard holds up a hand. "Not so fast, Major. No, they can't. But Constable Odo is unique, and uniquely vulnerable. There will be others coming for him, and they will try again. I propose that whether it is legitimate or not, we make a hearing out of this, that we win it, that we set a precedent. How does that sound?"

"That sounds like," Kira says, smiling at him, "we're going to war."

"I'm pleased we understand one another." Picard leans back in his chair. "An old friend of mine, who does hail from the sector JAG office as it happens, has agreed to oversee the matter. She'll be here on the late-night transport."

"Yes, sir," Kira says. At the next table, she realises, Molly O'Brien is pointing and waving enthusiastically while Keiko shushes her; Picard follows her gaze, and sighs. 

"Tell me," Kira says, "don't you find it inconvenient, with" – she waves at Picard's daemon, who throws back her head in soft-eyed disdain – "on a starship?"

Picard smiles. "There has been much interest, in recent years, about the physical presence and absence of human daemons. Do they occupy space in the same way as ordinary matter? Are they picked up by transporter pattern buffers, or do they disappear and reappear on the other side? I'm sure you know the sort of thing."

Kira nods.

"Well," Picard says, "I fear Elise and I have been possibly the most studied research subjects in Starfleet."

Kira smiles back, suddenly. "Let me get you some more tea, sir," she says, and knows he knows that that means, _thank you_.

*

"I keep thinking I see her," he says, and Beverly scrubs at her eyes. The newest speculative research to come out of the Vulcan Science Academy has been arguing that it's not that the Borg don't have daemons, although every witness to an assimilation has reported the drone's daemon blinking out of existence as though the mind creating it has been switched off. It's that the Borg are a mass collective consciousness and thus they only have one. Beverly hasn't slept at night recently for thinking about it: a termite the size of a planetoid, perhaps, or twisting forms as new drones are assimilated, some awful creature in the furthest reaches of space.

"Jean-Luc," she says, very softly, "is it possible" – she doesn't want to say this, but he was her captain and she is his chief medical officer and they are each other's friends: to say they owe each other the truth is both a harsh and understated way of putting it. "Is it possible that it is just…"

"A figment of my imagination," he finishes, with some element of bitterness. "Yes. Won't you take my word for it, Beverly?"

"For myself, always," she says, fiercely. "But this is about more than just me. This is about your command."

"My command," he says, eyes distant, "yes."

Beverly doesn't like it, this nowhere time. Commander Riker has discarded his field promotion but he's running the ship like he was born to it, with Shelby and Data as his right and left hands, and they're doing fine. But the Enterprise still has her captain aboard. Kept around by Starfleet as a scientific curiosity, perhaps, and Beverly's all for scientific research, but she found it unseemly, all breathless enquiries over the comm, asking after her medical records of the whole affair. She's sure there were researchers busy running statistical analyses, racing each other to publish, grabbing for those implants before they'd cooled from the heat of Jean-Luc Picard's body, while she and Data and Deanna did the clean up. They worked through the night, disconnecting Jean-Luc and Data from the collective, removing the implants, scrubbing everything in that room clean, and though none of the three of them admitted it aloud, waiting for the sound of hooves. 

It didn't come. 

"You're still you," Beverly says, steadfastly. "Whatever they did to you, Jean-Luc, you're still you. Perhaps your mind is just reminding you of that."

"Perhaps," he says, but his eyes track across the room, following the movement of something she can't see, and she squeezes her eyes tightly shut for a moment, trying to see her in memory. "Perhaps." 

"Perhaps," she echoes, and she doesn't know if it will help or hurt, to speak about her, but she thinks obscurely that speech, and memory, are always better than silence. "I always loved Elise, you know."

"As, of course, did I," he says, mock-rueful.

"No, but," Beverly says, "I had my little Toby" – who is hiding under the table, rather than bounding around the room looking for something to box; that's the part of him, and of Beverly, who doesn't want to rub it in that they're still one soul – "and Jack had his sparrow, and then there was you. You and your ridiculous giant horse daemon! How did you ever decide you wanted to go into space?"

"That's what my father used to say," Jean-Luc says. "If anything was evidence that I should have stayed on the vineyards, Elise was it. You should have seen their faces on my first day at the Academy."

He sounds fond, remembering, and Beverly laughs, wryly but truly. "I never went through the horse phase when I was younger," she admits. "No mucking out and jodhpurs. But I understand why other girls did."

"Doctor," Data says, coming into sickbay through the opening doors, "the information you requested." 

"Thank you, Data," Beverly says - glancing at it, she sighs; it's another litany of messages received by the Enterprise from cybernetics specialists all over the Federation. "Captain, I think we're done here, if you have somewhere else to be."

"Thank you, Doctor," Jean-Luc says, and neither of them mention the fact that a captain without a ship has very few places to be. "Elise wasn't a horse, incidentally."

Data says, "Elise stands thirteen and a half hands tall."

"Well done, Mr. Data," Jean-Luc says, amused, "she's a pony" – and then both he and Beverly seem to come to the same realisation at once. It's how Data's standing, close to his captain but not too close, perfectly calculated; it's how he used the present tense.

"You," Jean-Luc says, softly, "you were in my mind, when I was disconnected from the collective. Data, this is very irregular." He runs a hand over his eyes and starts again. "I want you to – touch her, if you can."

Data glances at Beverly for confirmation; she nods, grabs a tricorder and calibrates it on the fly. "Do it."

Data lifts a hand, and perhaps Beverly does see something, then – a shadow, maybe; or a flutter in the air like heat-haze – but in her hand, the tricorder spills data, Jean-Luc's heart rate spiking upwards, as someone other than himself lays hands on his daemon. At that sharp intake of breath, Data jerks back as though burned. He sits down on the floor, Jean-Luc sinks down on the edge of the bio-bed, and for a long minute they just sit in silence, the three of them and their daemons. 

A week later, she's visible to ordinary human eyes. Data calls, "Captain on the bridge!" as the turbolift doors open, and the crew look up in wonderment at the rhythm of the sound.

*

"State it for the record, please, Captain," Louvois says, and Kira respects this woman: she gets straight to the point. Her daemon is an Earth animal, a badger, with glittering black eyes and a white stripe along its face. "How long were you without a daemon?"

"Six days," Picard says, and Louvois nods.

"And you as well, please, Lieutenant Commander Dax."

Jadzia gets up and bows her head quickly; Kira knows that's a gesture of respect in Trill courts. "Between the disappearance of Leila, Curzon Dax's daemon, and the new joining, several days. But counting every host and every death, Dax has existed embodied but independently of a daemon for a total of sixty-four days, give or take the days of each joining."

Louvois nods again. "Thank you, Commander, that will be all."

Jadzia sits down, flashes Kira a quick, reassuring smile, and Kira's grateful to be sitting next to her as she leans back in her chair and takes in the scene. They've assembled this makeshift court in Quark's – there's no other room on Deep Space Nine large enough to accommodate everyone who wanted to be here for this – and Quark himself hasn't complained, has been oddly silent throughout, acquiescing with everything Captain Sisko thinks best. He's trying to imagine a life without Odo in it, Kira knows, because she's doing the same thing. So is everyone, in their way, the station staff and residents and frequent visitors, Odo's colleagues and friends, filling the chairs and lining the galleries, wanting to be here. Odo himself is present, but not speaking. He sits alone in the front row of the public gallery, hands loosely bound. Kira hasn't been able to catch his eye. 

"Next," Captain Picard says – he and Sisko are running this show, as Satie's running his; they've made a bilateral decision not to involve the lawyers – "I would like to produce Exhibit C: Lieutenant Commander Data."

Louvois raises an eyebrow. "Excuse me, Captain, but I seem to recall going to a great deal of effort and aggravation to establish that Commander Data is a witness, not an exhibit."

"Bear with me," Picard says, gesturing, and Data rises and takes the stand Jadzia has just vacated. "Commander, can you call your daemon to you?"

"Yes, sir."

"Do so, please."

Data nods, and after a moment, complies: he holds out an arm so his daemon lands on the tips of his outstretched fingers, and brings her to his heart perched on his hand. She nips at his ear, and Kira sits back in her chair, considering. She's seen a dozen people use that gesture before – bird daemons are disproportionately common among human Starfleet officers – but up there, it seems too intimate for public consumption. Picard, she decides, knows how to manipulate a crowd.

"Right," he says. "Let's begin."

*

So things are going about as well as can be expected, after an experiment that involved both Noonian Soong - Geordi gets that he was a genius and that without him Data wouldn't exist, so, sure, he's broadly in favour, but Geordi's starting to wonder whether he'd have left the guy in charge of Data's cat, let alone his emotional development - and, for a mere afterthought, sending something like a million volts of electricity into the mind of a sentient being.

And Geordi guesses that it's kind of understandable if not expected, that after yet another encounter with his creator – _father_ ; nothing but 'father' can be dysfunctional enough by this stage, not now it's become apparent Soong was leaving ticking time-bomb messages for Data in _his own head_ \- Data might be a little off-balance. Dr. Bashir fusses around, checking meters and readings, making small interested noises; Geordi sits and watches Data move distractedly around the room, half-answering Bashir's questions, and half somewhere else entirely. 

"Give it time," Allie murmurs into his ear, and Geordi nods, bringing a hand up to scratch the top of her head. Her ears dip under his palm, then bounce back up. 

"Data," Geordi says, and Data doesn't turn instantly, his eyes on something on the other side of the room. "You okay?"

"Yes, Geordi," Data says, and that's even a note of distraction in his voice, maybe, but Geordi thinks again about that million-volt surge of electricity, and resolves to let him be. 

When the doors to main engineering open and Captain Picard comes in, glancing around to take in the scene, Geordi worries for a moment about why he wants to supervise them personally before he remembers the captain has spent the last two days avoiding reports about Bajoran agricultural irrigation. Picard pauses on the threshold, looking at Data, at the Enterprise schematics on the wall, at Dr. Bashir, at Data again, and Geordi's aware, suddenly, of some incipient strangeness. Dr. Bashir hasn't looked up yet, but his daemon - a little fennec, Geordi hasn't caught her name - stands still, her ears in two sharp points. Geordi takes another second to see it, but Picard is standing exactly the same way as Data, on one foot, half off-balance, eyes tracking something halfway across the room.

"Well, Data," Picard says, finally, with warmth in his voice, "it appears the experiment was a success." He pauses, seems unsure about what he wants to say next. "Do you think that, eventually, others…

He trails off, looking at Geordi, but Data, oddly, comes to attention. "Yes, sir. I do."

"I'm pleased to hear it," Picard says. "Carry on, gentlemen."

Later, Geordi thinks he's an idiot for not figuring it out right then - Bashir is the specialist, but he _knows_ Data - and there are even a couple of moments where he catches a flash of movement in the periphery of the VISOR field, but in the end it isn't till late that night, still in engineering, when he looks up at the rush and downdraft of wings.

He turns to see Data sitting cross-legged on the floor with a large black bird perched on his overturned palms, ragged-edged, warm with infrared. 

Data looks up suddenly, catches sight of Geordi's face. "Geordi, can you see-"

"Yes," Geordi says, reverent, "yes. Data, it - she?" - Data nods - "she's beautiful, oh my God, Data" - and then there's a part of him cringing with embarrassment at what he just said, so high school, so coy, _your daemon is beautiful_ , but there's another, greater part of him that's thinking it like it's a true thing, like it's a real thing, like Data and Geordi himself and their two daemons within the skin of the Enterprise in warp, all living things in glorious flight.

*

"I object to this, Captain," Satie says, with some asperity. "Whatever that thing is, it's not a daemon. It’s not even clear if it’s – an it. A mechanical thing, I mean, because Data won’t let anyone come near it! If he would just cooperate, allow us to…”

Data says, "Is that an order, sir?"

"Belay it if so," Picard snaps. "There is a simpler way to resolve this. Data," he adds, kindly, "I know you aren't in the habit of lying to me. But for the avoidance of doubt, I'm ordering you to answer my next few questions truthfully. Is that understood?"

"Yes, sir."

"The bird circling around your head. Who or what is that?"

"That is my daemon, sir."

Picard nods. "I see. What pronouns do you request are used to make reference to your daemon?"

"In languages where it is possible, she, her and hers."

"Noted, Mr. Data. No further questions." Picard overturns his palms, smiles wryly and sits down. When Satie looks like he's going to start ranting at any moment, Picard adds, from his chair: "I did ask him to answer truthfully, Commander. The day Data starts lying to me is the day I have bigger problems than you."

Satie leaps to his feet and says, "Commander Data, if you are answering questions put to you truthfully, answer this: what is that thing up there? Is it technological, is it biological, or something else?"

"I cannot answer that."

Satie starts looking triumphant. "You were ordered to tell the truth."

"I choose to disobey, sir." 

"Why?"

"Needs must in a time of war, sir."

" _Data_ ," Picard says, hissed through his teeth.

"What will you do to me," Data asks, "if I tell you my daemon is a technological attempt at life, a thing like myself? What scientific research will be then be deemed… necessary? And if I tell you that she is a daemon like your own, an organic manifestation of a sentient being's mind?"

"Yes?" Satie snaps, impatient.

Data says, after a long moment, "Then whatever is done to Constable Odo, I will be complicit."

After that, a recess is called.

*

Bashir takes the stand cautiously, placing his hand on the padd with deliberation. When the computer has finished reciting his identity and credentials, he says, emotionless: "I am very smart." 

There's a pause, as the public gallery finishes settling in after the lunchbreak, the rustling sounds and small movements replaced by silence. Kira leans forward; from somewhere to her left, she's aware that Jadzia's daemon (a small, bright-eyed Trill mammal; "He's not a polecat, Benjamin, he's a _chhachunder_ , I don't mangle your language") is muttering something in her own daemon's ear. Kira can't hear it, but she can feel the comfort it gives. 

Bashir says, "I graduated first in my class at Starfleet Medical Academy. I have been told that I have about the sharpest mind of my generation. This is my daemon."

He lifts her off the podium in front of him as he says it, and nearly everyone is sitting close enough to see her. She's a kind of Earth animal called a fennec fox, Kira has been told: a desert creature, with black eyes and triangular ears that come to almost geometrically sharp points. As he goes on, Bashir traces a finger along the lines of those ears, over her head, and again. Up, down, across, up, down. She's seen him do that a hundred times, Kira realises, in long meetings, while waiting to meet someone at the replimat, when thinking out loud. 

"Sharp," Bashir says, suddenly. "Amal is sharp, like me. Could I have an image, please?"

Someone somewhere hits a control panel, and the image is beamed up on the wall, a holoimage with a shallow depth. It shows a young child, laughing and holding his daemon up to the camera: it's in the form of a rabbit, Kira notes, like Commander La Forge's daemon, sitting just across on the other side of the room. "That's me," Bashir says, unnecessarily for anyone who knows him, his eyes vividly apparent in the child's face. "It was taken just before I turned six. Tell me - this is a question for the humans in attendance, here - when you were a child, did your mother make little jokes about what your daemon would be? Mine certainly did. She used to say that my daemon would be a parrot, who talked all the time, or a bunny rabbit who never stopped bouncing."

There's another strange pause. 

"Some of you will know that not long after this picture was taken, I was taken by my parents to Adigeon Prime, a non-Federation world on the fringes of Romulan space, and subjected to invasive and illegal genetic resequencing to increase my coordination and intellectual ability. The procedures were very successful and in due order the child in that image ceased to exist. I am what is left of him: the not-quite human remains, with my not-quite human daemon, who might have been talkative, or bouncy, or a thousand things other than honed to sharpness.”

Another long, contemplative pause. “Constable Odo is the security chief of this station. I am its Chief Medical Officer. Why don’t you come for us all, one by one."

He sits down to dead silence. Satie looks like he'll say something, then doesn't. Julian is on Kira's other side, and she listens quietly for a while to the rapid pitch and fall of his breathing.

*

“What do you think he’ll be like?” Keiko asks, a little nervously. Kira’s taking her leave in ad hoc chunks, with Captain Sisko’s amused approval; when she sneezes more than fourteen times before she gets out of bed in the morning, she calls in pregnant to Ops. Keiko had worried about whether they would clash, spending whole days together when Kira is too tired to move around the station too much, but mostly, Kira is quiet, restful company. Keiko guesses it’s because she used to live in tiny spaces, caves and shuttlecraft and refugee camps, and knows how to get along.

Keiko is still nervous, though. It’s hard not to think of this whole scenario as an imposition – as a visitor in the space of Kira’s body that does nothing but eat and kick, and never leaves – but as though she knows what Keiko's thinking, Kira glances up and smiles at her, then looks down at her bump. She still looks faintly surprised at the sight of it. “You mean, the young man? Surely you’d know better than I would.”

Keiko smiles back, relaxing a little. They're taking tea together, a quiet, civilised mid-morning break. “He never kicked me,” she says. “I never got that far. You at least know how energetic he’s going to be.”

Kira laughs at that, and strokes her daemon, the little Bajoran hara-cat curled around her feet. “Just from knowing his parents, I suspect he'll have plenty of energy."

“Maybe he’ll have a cheetah daemon,” Keiko says, smiling, and off Kira’s confused look, adds: “It’s a kind of Earth animal, they run faster than anything else. My sister has one and she never sits still. He settled when he was ten and no one was surprised."

Kira nods, understanding. “When I was that age I was different,” she says, after a moment’s thought. “Always angry, always going off like a firecracker, always wanting to blow up Cardassians right that very minute. I mean, more so than now,” she adds, and Keiko smiles. “I don’t regret anything about joining the Resistance so young, but I’m glad I’ve grown, you know? Perhaps it’s for the best that our daemons don’t settle at that age.”

Keiko puts a hand on her own daemon, who has retreated within his shell for the time being, and takes another sip of her tea. “I didn’t realise – when do Bajoran daemons settle?”

Kira frowns. “They don’t. We’re born with settled daemons. Didn’t you know?”

“No, I didn't." Keiko considers that. “So you… sort of know who you’re going to be?”

“Yes and no.” Kira ruffles her daemon’s ears, and smiles as the purring begins. “Your daemon grows and changes with you, perhaps, is a better way of putting it. All you know, when you’re born, is that you’re Bajoran. Which is all you need, maybe.”

Keiko smiles, and then stops. She says, with the same inflections as Kira used: “You know when you’re born. That you’re Bajoran.”

Kira looks down at her bump, then up at Keiko. “Oh."

“Oh,” Keiko says, and has to sit down for a moment, while she thinks about that.

*

The daemon that's looking out of the basket has the enormous eyes of kittens everywhere, and there’s a palpable softening of the room. And then, a small intake of tension, as people’s eyes travel from the little cat to her older sibling, curled around Kira’s neck.

"This is my son," Keiko says, clearly as a struck bell. She places her hands on the lectern, one on either side of the baby basket, and addresses the room. In the front row, Miles's cocker spaniel daemon is standing poised, tensely alert. "His name is Kirayoshi O'Brien. He is Japanese. He is Irish. He is human. He is Dakhuri. He is Bajoran. He is factually unique. What he will grow up to be, no one knows yet. Perhaps he'll be a scientist or a soldier, like his mothers; perhaps he'll be an engineer like his father. Perhaps he'll be something else entirely.

"But how dare this court" – Keiko looks around, looks at Kira and Miles and Louvois and Sisko and Odo – "and how dare anyone else presume to reduce him to biology? How dare you presume what any soul may be?"

She picks Yoshi up with determination and sits back down. When Commander Satie returns to his side of the room, he says, "This is becoming rather a free-for-all."

"Not at all," Captain Sisko says, with equanimity, although Kira's still close enough to hear the low-level growling. "Mr. O'Brien was the penultimate exhibit in defence of Constable Odo. The last person to speak will be Counsellor Deanna Troi."

Troi comes to the stand with complete confidence, Kira notices, and remembers Troi is an empath: she, more than anyone, should know exactly the mood of the room, and how to manipulate it. Her daemon is at her feet, a small white cat with bright blue eyes. As Kira watches, it becomes some kind of rodent, then a lizard, then a cat again. Betazoid daemons never settle.

"Counsellor Troi," Louvois says, surprised. "Are you here to give your professional opinion on this matter?"

"Not exactly, Captain, although I will if necessary." To Kira's ears, that sounds like a veiled threat; she thinks she might come to like Deanna Troi, given more time. "I'm actually here on behalf of Reginald Barclay and the Pathfinder Project. We feel that there has been data collected by the project that may be relevant."

Louvois is no fool. "The Borg drone," she says, and although most of the room turn to look at Picard, she doesn't. "Continue."

*

Thirty-four days, six hours, seven minutes and two seconds after Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix 01, is separated permanently and transformatively from the collective, she opens her eyes halfway through a regeneration cycle and meets a pair of yellow eyes, staring at her balefully out of the dark.

In the artificial light of the ship's morning, once the regeneration cycle is complete, she steps out of her alcove and considers the matter. Perhaps it was a hallucination; the Borg do not hallucinate, but it has now been thirty-four days, twelve hours, forty-four seconds since she was disconnected from the Borg, and now, in the brighter light, the cargo bay is deserted. She is pleased with this logical conclusion. But then she steps out into the bay and notes the movement by her feet, a red-corded animal moving with an unsettling swiftness across the floor. She watches it curl and slither with some dispassion before she reaches for it, letting it twirl itself around her arm, its head coming to rest at her wrist. She watches as its mouth opens, its forked tongue coming out to taste the air. She can feel a strangeness in her own mouth, a dry mustiness, and a collection of other sensations that she has no name for.

Seven of Nine has been told that in the event of a medical emergency on board this ship that it is appropriate to call sickbay, and ask for the Doctor. She considers doing this. Then she decides against it, and sets out along the long ship's corridors with a determined stride.

"Come in," comes the captain's voice, and Seven does so. The captain is dressed for the day, but was apparently interrupted in the task of affixing the pips to her collar. Seven of Nine understands that these are markers of her rank aboard this vessel. "Seven! Well, this is a surprise. Come on in, I was just having breakfast."

Seven does not eat, but she accepts a mug of tea for the warmth it will convey to her hands. Voyager is cold, compared to Borg vessels. Captain Janeway takes a sip from her own and says, "What can I do for you?"

She hesitates, then holds out her arm. But then she draws back in surprise in exactly the same way as the captain; the thing has become a fieldmouse, black eyes bright. It twitches its nose and twitches its tail and Seven wonders how she did not feel the intrusion of such a transformation, so close to her skin. 

"Oh," Janeway says, her hands coming together, her voice dropping with some reverence. "Well. I can't say I hadn't wondered about this."

"It is a daemon," Seven of Nine says, feeling the need to state it, and Janeway nods.

"That's right, Seven. Like Zeno." Janeway steps to one side and Seven of Nine looks at her captain's daemon. She knows of course that humans have daemons, and has registered them in the same way, perhaps, as she registered their faces and their names, their ranks, their various markers of difference: relevant details, but merely details. She looks at the wolf curled on the floor, its ears pricked up and its great paws crossed in front of its body and for the first time, wonders what aspects of this creature, known for its ferocity and its loyalty, manifest in the woman standing in front of her. "I thought," she says, a little hesitantly, "that in an adult human, a daemon ought to take just one form."

"You mean, yours hasn't" – and then it happens in front of her, the mouse shifting in size, growing quills. A porcupine, Seven of Nine thinks, drawing the name of the creature from the memory of some long-ago human drone. It has prickles, and enjoys the taste of salt. "Of course," Janeway says. "Your daemon wasn't with you at the age of settling, Seven. Perhaps now he's back, he'll take his time over it."

"He," Seven of Nine says, trying that out. 

"Or she," Janeway says quickly, "or they – I didn't mean to presume."

She considers the matter. "I do not know," she says at last.

"That's okay," Janeway says. "Give it time. I think you should go to sickbay, though, just to check everything is all right. I can call in late to the bridge" – she grins wickedly, and at her feet Zeno yawns, showing off rows of sharp teeth – "and take you down. Would you prefer that?"

"That would be satisfactory," Seven of Nine says. 

On the way down along the hallways to the ship's medical bay, her daemon becomes a hawk, a hummingbird, a snake again, a feline. Each transformation is fascinating. The Doctor, when he sees the cat draped over her shoulders, says, "Oh, my goodness, how wonderful" – and Seven holds back from his enthusiasm, obscurely full of trepidation at thought of a part of her inner self on display. But the captain stays while the Doctor makes his examination, his own daemon squawking as he does so, and Seven is grateful for her presence. "You're lucky, Seven," the Doctor says, when he puts his tricorder down, and she recalls that his daemon is a copy of his creator's, as not to frighten his patients; but as with almost all holographic entities, the finch daemon has no sentience of its own. It is an interesting thought.

"One more thing, Seven," Captain Janeway says, as she turns to go. "He – or she, or they – must have a name. I presume you don't remember…"

Seven shakes her head.

"I can consult the Federation databases," Janeway says, kindly. "The name will be listed with your birth certificate and your parents' census records. Would you like me to look into it? I won't, if you don't want me to."

"No," Seven says, instinctively, and after another second: "Perhaps not yet."

Janeway nods, and smiles at her, and Seven's daemon becomes a brightly coloured thing, a parrot, perhaps, or a macaw. Seven watches it fly around sickbay and thinks that she is Seven of Nine, but they call her Seven; that all things change. 

A new name, then. For something and someone new.

She returns to her duties.

*

"Thank you, Counsellor," Louvois says, after Troi has finished her account. "Thank you, all of you. We will reconvene in the morning at 0900 hours."

And that's it, Kira thinks, bleakly. She gets up and finds all her muscles have seized up without her noticing; she stretches out and closes her eyes, and when she looks back, they've taken Odo away. "Biological research," she says, her hands coming together, coming apart, and Jadzia takes her arm and steers out of the bar, onto the Promenade. "What does that mean, what will they do…"

"You're staying with me, tonight," Jadzia says, and Kira notices the confabulation between Jadzia's and Captain Sisko's daemons and knows she's being handled, but she's too tired and wound up to care. She follows Jadzia to her quarters with barely the energy to pick her feet off the ground. All night, Kira thinks she hears hooting and barking and hissing echoing down the station corridors, as if no one can sleep, and Jadzia sits up with her, and holds her hand, and doesn't tell her everything will be fine, and then the morning comes.

It's as crowded as it was the day before, perhaps more so. They all take the same seats, as though choreographed. When Louvois stands up, not so much as a feather rustles.

"Let it be stated for the record," Louvois says, "that I have been called to answer the question of whether the Federation Department of Internal Affairs, as assisted by Starfleet, may intern the changeling Odo, erstwhile security chief of Terok Nor and Deep Space Nine, on the grounds of not so much fraternising with the enemy as constituting them in his very being. Commander Satie, I'm grateful for your written submissions; Captain Sisko, Captain Picard, for your various testimonies."

She pauses there, walks around the table, and then back, pacing, then takes her seat again. Kira breathes.

"I understand what's been happening here," Louvois says, gently, to Captain Picard. "You called as your exhibits, yourself, Commander Data, Commander Dax, Deanna Troi on behalf of Seven of Nine, Dr Bashir, Keiko O'Brien. You called them as your exhibits, and I understand what you, in your pompous-ass way" – a softening to her expression – "were trying to tell me. If one may only be a person with a true daemon, of one's own species, settled at the right time and present ever after, then you – all of you, are things. I appreciate what you've shown me, this great diversity of sentience, and I believe I understand it.

"But all of you have daemons. Elise returned to you, Jean-Luc. Dax has had seven daemons accompanying her soul. I acknowledge that Commander Data was thirty years old and a decorated Starfleet officer before his daemon came to him, but now that she has, I doubt he'll be hauled up for me to rule again on his personhood any time soon. And, I, too," she adds, softly, glancing at Keiko with the basket in her arms, "would be interested to see what the world has in store for the young Mr. O'Brien. But how do we answer the question of Odo? It remains: all of you are humanoid; all of you have daemons."

"That's just the point," Picard says, furiously, "Like the Horta or the Sulamids or a half-dozen other Federation species I could mention, Constable Odo is not humanoid..."

"Excuse me," Kira finds herself saying, standing up before her conscious mind is even registering what she's about to do. "I would like to make a statement."

"Major Kira," Louvois says, "at this stage, this isn't procedurally appropriate" - and Kira shakes her head and opens her mouth to say something else, but there's a purr from behind her, and it's not her own.

"Captain," Sisko says, from the second row of seats, "I admit that in some circumstances strict procedural compliance is appropriate, but we're holding this hearing in Quark's bar." 

Quark, across the room on a barstool, puts in automatically, "Quark's Bar, Grill, Gaming House, Holosuite Arcade and Holding Company."

It's just the right note of ridiculous, at just the right time. Kira could kiss him. Louvois looks at Kira for a long moment, and says: "Proceed."

On the way to the stand, Kira is starting to understand what this is, what this means, this anger that's rising in her, this anger that somehow transcends a past of war and occupation and genocide. What it is, with Odo sitting there quiescent on that chair, is the anger of something to lose. And she thinks, as her hands come to rest on the stand, that she might begin by shouting. But her eyes come to rest on Keiko and Kirayoshi, and they, too, did their part in teaching Kira what it was to have something to lose. "This is my daemon," she finds herself saying, gently, as though this is a quiet conversation over coffee. "Her name is Hara and she's a hara-cat, I've heard all the jokes."

Hara bounces up onto the stand as she says it, and Kira takes a moment just to stroke her thick, soft, sand-mottled fur. Hara-cats are typically camouflaged in their habitats, merging into the dappled light of the forests. Kira thinks about days in the Resistance, teaching herself to vanish from sight and sensors, learning what her daemon already knew.

"You've heard from Keiko already," Kira adds, after a moment. "How I came to be the first Bajoran in history, probably, to carry and give birth to a human child. I feared that, when I was young," she adds. "I grew up during the Cardassian occupation of Bajor. My own mother was raped by Cardassian soldiers. I feared an invasion of my body.

"It wasn't like that, for me. Miles' and Keiko's son is my son. He has a hara-cat as his daemon because he is my son. This is not Terok Nor, this is Deep Space Nine." She pauses, looks around at all of them, at Jadzia and Captain Sisko, at the Enterprise crew, at Quark and the customers on the barstools, at the Bajoran people lining the galleries and levels, at this space station they've built. "Now Deep Space Nine is at the front lines of a new war. Captain Louvois, I've lived in places like this before. I know you have to make great sacrifices. I'm willing to make them." 

Dreamily, she pulls her phaser from her sidearm and holds it up, showing it to the assembled court, and then points it downwards at her daemon's skull. "People can live without their daemons. If it's shown us anything, this hearing has shown us that. And Hara's been mine for a long time. She'll live on in Kirayoshi."

Around her, she can hear the crowd's murmurs. She can hear Jadzia's voice, and Captain Sisko's. She can hear the scrape of chairs as they begin to move towards her. On the stand in front of her, Hara makes no sound. 

"Major Kira," Louvois says, dangerously, and stands up. "Put down your weapon."

Kira doesn't, but holds it out in front of her. "I want this on the record," she says, clearly. "I want it on the record that I am willing to do this. I will be first officer of Deep Space Nine without my daemon, with no daemon. I will serve alongside Constable Odo, with no daemon. We are the senior staff of this station and we will do what we have to do."

"Major," Louvois says, this time with infinite gentleness. "I promise you, I will take into account your words. I would take it as a kindness if you would hand your weapon to Captain Sisko."

Sisko is there, at Kira's right hand. "You didn't have to do this," he says, as he takes the phaser, and Kira strokes her daemon with her other hand, and they all know he's lying.

*

They release Odo. They release him that afternoon, once the crowds have dispersed slightly, and Kira has pulled rank and kicked the Bajoran news reporters off the Promenade. She waits for the paperwork to be completed, tapping her foot impatiently all the time, brushes off anyone who tries to talk to her until it's just the two of them, walking slowly to her quarters along the curve of the habitat ring. "How are you?" she says after a minute, and trusts he'll know it's not an idle inquiry; nothing else is so important to her, right now.

"I'll be all right, Nerys," Odo says, and he sounds tired and a little sad, but otherwise quite ordinary. She wonders bleakly if this really is business as usual for Odo; if he expected nothing better of solids, after all. After a moment, he adds, "At least, I'm here to be all right" – and she smiles a little at that.

They reach her quarters and she bustles around, clears the table, makes tea, while he sits softly in a corner and says and does nothing. "I guess you'd like to dissolve for a while," she says, without turning around, and he says, from behind her:

"Soon."

But neither of them have any sense of urgency. Chief O'Brien was here this afternoon, checking the place for surveillance equipment and destroying anything he found; Kira was grateful, and she knows she's going to have think about that some more, but not now. Not now, when she's so tired. "I want you to know," she says, after some time, "that you can always be exactly who you are, around me."

"I know, Nerys," he says, softly, and she thinks, of course, he does. That's how this whole mess started; that's how Odo came to be standing in this room, a changeling, a non-humanoid, just as he is, with no daemon. In front of her, and that damned surveillance camera, and the Prophets. 

"Why didn't you fight back?" she asks him, as she takes the mug out of the replicator. "You could have shapeshifted out of anything they used to hold you. You could have run. You know Captain Sisko, me, Dax, all of us, we'd have gotten you away from here, somewhere they couldn't find you."

Odo looks at her, and she reads an element of surprise in his face. Kira's daemon trots over to him as he does, and he holds a hand to her, close but not touching. "This is my home," he says, as though it's coming to him for the first time. "There's nowhere else I could go." 

After a second, he adds, "I know you really would have done it" – and there's nothing either of them can say after that.

When he reverts to liquid form, she still has a sense of his presence. She drinks her tea at the table, thinking about how much greater and more complicated her life has become since she was a child in the caves: about how this, after all, is what she fought for, to protect those who need protecting, and be a voice for those who have none.

*

Late that night, they're in the holosuites, all of them, before the Enterprise leaves dock in the morning and the station returns to battle readiness. "I suppose we're lucky," Jadzia says, drawing patterns in the sand with her toe, "that the Jem'Hadar didn't attack when we were in the middle of depositions."

"Some luck," Kira says, and stands up, stretching out. It smells wrong; holosuites always smell wrong to her, too much perfect salt air and not enough rotting fish and bladderwrack. But the water laps in, low and comforting on the shore, and that, at least, seems real. Jadzia's picnic blanket is real, too, brought in from her quarters, and so is Deanna Troi, sitting on the other side of it and looking up at her daemon, shifting into a bird with wings like flame. 

"I'm pleased for you, Major," she says, gently, and Kira remembers that a Betazoid daemon reflects not only its owner's mood, but that of everyone in the room. There's a whole flock above her right now, a crow and an owl and an albatross and an eagle and a finch, all wheeling and calling and riding the thermals. A rabbit and Jadzia's polecat bound towards them from further down the beach. From the look of it, Commander La Forge and Data are playing the old game, how far apart they can get before it starts to hurt, and along from them, Julian's fennec and Miles's cocker spaniel are scrapping in the rockpools, rolling over and over into the sand. 

Battle stations in the morning. Kira lies down on the picnic blanket and closes her eyes, listens to the sounds of hooves and cawing and purring and paws, the slither of snakeskin, the small yaps, the wash of the waves, and the purring of Hara next to her heart.

**Author's Note:**

> The daemons in this story were established with the assistance of silly_cleo, cosmic_llin, brewsternorth, shinyjenni, such_heights, and this glorious [fanart](http://cosmic-llin.tumblr.com/post/90494006520/onetobeamup-agatharights-and-hatepig-made-me-do). All except Data's, which is, of course, [canonical](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7ga0CxQ4WU). :)


End file.
